Last week in our parenting course, one set of questions we reflected on as we consider where we come from and what we pass on to our children was:

“What do we include and bring along from our past?

What do we choose to release and discard?

And what do we transform?

In short: keep, chuck or recycle?

My lovely neighbor, Sally, sent me this photo from our community’s recent day of the dead celebration. As I sit with the many lights on the grave sites, the lineages that have come before us lie there, still. Their efforts ripple on, we carry them on within us.

Then I look at the photos of course participants’ children: wide-eyed, open, core-goodness yet unhindered. Their future in formation.

What do we as a culture pass on to our children? What chain reactions in our lineages are ready to die off, be done with, healed and laid to rest?

What can we do, within ourselves and between one another, to truly lay our dead to rest, by consciously facing and choosing what we inherit, rather than continuing an unquestioned hand-me-down version of humanity through generations?